Gardenless: what I came to see

I.
i.
As the train moved slowly out of M. on its way south, I watched an apartment building - tall, modern, ugly - approach and slide away. Its balconies, covered with mesh, ran the length of each floor. Spread across the length of an apartment was a scrim of indeterminate green vines. Here was someone who didn't want to look at the railyard all day - quite reasonably - and who'd devised a solution, an accommodation, really: to live as though in a jungle, so that the outside world was no more than a dull haze of light through leaves. Better not to see outside at all, better to retreat.

ii
Half an hour out, the arid plain crumpled into fields and folds and hills of olives. Each horned tree stooped, its foliage centrally parted and tufted like hair. The hills rolled by - white, almost-white, dun, silver, brown, etoliated yellow, frost green. Black puffs of pine trees, tall cypress, olives olives olives. Soil of clay and chalk.

Our train slowed as we passed camouflaged men with guns and dogs, walking side by side, grim and deliberate, across a field. A flock of birds startled into silver-white flight.

iii
I soon discovered that the green scrim was merely the vegetate version of a shield between the private self and the street that one sees everywhere in the region. In the city of C., wooden screens carved into small stars were placed in front of windows at street level. The houses themselves, built of solid stone whitewashed or painted in bright colors, give only the rarest hint of the planted courtyards and elaborate tile work inside. One opens a heavy wooden door from the street to find a courtyard tiled in ochre and blue, or green and red, or blue and white, filled with potted palms, and geraniums, and perhaps an orange tree. It is not that its residents never admit outsiders - the city throws open its famed interior courtyards to strangers every spring - merely that they do not welcome them reflexively; and in our era of habitual over-sharing, this guardedness, this restraint, seems laudable. I always prefer those who undersell, who surprise, who leave something to be discovered.

After the Great Plague come from Algeria carried off a quarter of the population, mourners in the city of S. built a hospital for the elderly sacerdotes whose prayers had been so ineffectual. It was a place of respite and treatment; the round fountain that sits down a flight of round steps was not merely ornamental. One comes upon the garden by passing through a heavy door that reveals, first, a frenzy of tiles: and then, progressing from the stolid exterior through the entryroom, one finds this cool recess, now lined with potted orange trees and azaleas. Windows set above arches appear to lean over a murmuring fountain, peering in, everything drawn down into the middle, into the all-seeing eye.

***

II.
You know, I found it all charming, at least initially: the oranges dropped like lost tennis balls in the streets, the trees laid out in grids, shrubs sheared into emerald poodles, bougainvillea splayed across city walls, purple Tradescantia pallida bearding windows (perhaps the only Jews left in the region). In the famous gardens of the A. (in the city of S.), silk floss trees shed fist-sized, flamingo-pink flowers. It is hard not to enjoy cities designed by people whose attention to fruitless detail was so uncompromising that they tiled even the undersides of their balconies (so that, looking up from the street, the bright sky is plain in comparison); whose attitude seemed always to have been, "Why not add one more pattern?" I like the typical combination of ocher and blue, I wrote exuberantly, foolishly. I like that the beautiful historic part of the city extends beyond the tourist ghetto [literally: in most cases, the former ghettos have been re-purposed and misunderstood as charming labyrinths selling postcards and jewelry]. I like my local bar, where last night I took one of my father's paperbacks from college (Galbraith, The Affluent Society; Galbraith was apparently the Jane Austen of economists). I like that I constantly smell jasmine...

***

III.

Yet there is something to be said for restraint, I realized. - And it is not just the ocular relief that comes from leaving a room, every inch of which has been carved and molded and tiled and inlaid, only to enter a garden composed, in sum, of four walls, two fragrant myrtle hedges, and one rectangle of water.

ii.

The most famous garden, the one I had heard of, the one around which I booked my whole trip, was not my favorite. It is located, admittedly, in the most charming setting of almost any place I have ever been: perched across a dale from the old fortress, on a low mountain overlooking the old white city. The fortress lit up, green and gold, in the late October sun.

But once you arrive in the garden, it is too good a view, and you cannot be satisfied with what you had anticipated you'd see. The eye roams: and there is nothing more fatal. It wanders down the hills and up again, to the caves where gypsies still live; over the old white city, across the plain, to the low mountains beyond. One is enchanted by possibility, the endless assumption that something else will come along to be seen and admired. (Only when one briefly enters a walled water garden do visitors begin to calm down, like overexcited wasps once the open soda can has been thrown away.) We can breathe up high, looking out, because we have to commit to nothing, we have to acquaint ourselves intimately with nothing; we are always at a remove from what we see.

And so, for the most lauded garden I visited, it was always best seen from afar; and when I was in it, I always found myself looking, longing, elsewhere.

iii.
The walled garden, you know, is the opposite of the great view: it is all intimacy. There is little by way of preamble or anticipation. To build a walled garden is another way of removing yourself from the world, obviously, but in order to create a space for contemplation, not hauteur.

(...Can one call the C.d.P. restrained? As much as the ancestral home of the M. family - who have, at last count, something like 54 separate titles - can be said to be restrained.)

The main garden is not quite symmetrical, but it will take a while before you realize this. (One ochre wing of the building protrudes slightly.) But it is divided roughly in quarters along axes that meet in a splashing marble fountain, whose vigorous classicism is weakened by the enthusiastic application of tiles, and within each quarter into neat parterres. The central path ends in a simple one-story arcade decorated with remnants of Roman sculpture; on either side are faded red (vibrant brick, salmon-pink) walls, with matching terra-cotta pots of geraniums dancing above. Above the wall spreads a third canopy of bougainvillea. (It reminds me of the tunnel of wisteria once created by Iris Origo, to protect her fair skin from the sunny Italian summers.)

At every pace, a closer look rewards the viewer: the plashing fountain, the hidden grotto in a corner, the way the orange trees, shaped like umbrellas, echo also the building arches; and how the tall cypress is pointed just exactly like the crenellations atop the walls; above all, the way the strict regularity of these repetitive green shapes allow you to focus and be still. A garden like this reveals more the longer you stay; there are a hundred new views and a hundred new realizations if only you're willing to look. The birds have built a nest in the green tunnel atop the walls; the ocher-yellow arches have a tiny blue border of circles and triangles, like a bracelet; each marble column is sunk into a squat, squashed marble flower at its base, petals splayed along the brick.